Over the past fifty years, historians reinterpreted Civil War Reconstruction. Shortly before the Centennial it was generally agreed the chief aim of the Republican-dominated congress was to ensure lasting party control of the federal government by creating a reliable voting bloc in the South for which improved racial status among blacks was a coupled, but secondary, objective. However, by the Sesquicentennial it had become the accepted view that Republicans were primarily driven by an enlightened drive for racial equality untainted by anything more than negligible self interest. Consequently the presently dominant race-centric focus on Reconstruction minimizes political and economic aspects.

Contrary to popular belief Southern poverty has been a longer-lasting Civil War legacy than has Jim Crow or segregation. Prior to the war the South had a bimodal wealth distribution with concentrations at the poles. The classic planters with fifty or more slaves had prosperous estates but they represented less than 1% of Southern families. Partly because 1860 slave property values represented 48% of Southern wealth, seven of the ten states with the highest per capita wealth soon joined the Confederacy.

However, since two thirds of Southern families did not own slaves the 1860, per capita income of the region was only slightly ahead of the north central states and well behind the average northeastern state. A century later eight of the bottom ten states in per capita income were former members of the Confederacy. Even 151 years later only one Southern state, Virginia, ranked within the top ten in per capita income. Moreover, five (half) of the bottom ten in 2011 were former Confederate states. The classic example is Mississippi, which ranked number one in 1860 per capita wealth, but was dead last at fiftieth in 2011 per capita income. The depths of post Civil War Southern poverty and its duration were far greater, longer, and more multiracial than is commonly understood. It took eighty-five years for the South’s per capita income to regain the below average percentile ranking it held in 1860.

The war had destroyed two-thirds of Southern railroads and two-thirds of the region’s livestock was gone. Steamboats had nearly disappeared from the rivers. One hundred million dollars in insurance investments and twice that amount in bank capital had vanished. Excluding the 100% loss in the value of slaves resulting from emancipation, assessed property values at the end of the war were more than 40% lower than in 1860. Approximately a 300,000 white Southern males in the prime of adulthood died during the war and perhaps another 200,000 were incapacitated, representing about 18% of the region’s approximate 2.75 million white males of all ages in 1860 and about 36% of those over age nineteen.

During the war, Southern farms drifted back to nature. Since their protective levees had been destroyed, thousands of square miles of Mississippi delta cotton lands were overrun with briers and cane thickets. Returning Confederate soldiers often found their families existing in starving conditions. In December 1865 an estimated half-million whites in three Gulf states alone were without life’s necessities, and some had starved to death.

Historian David L. Cohn adds:

When there was a shortage of work stock, the few surviving animals were passed from neighbor to neighbor. [When] there was no work stock [the men] hitched themselves to the plow. By ingenuity, backbreaking toil, and cruel self-denial thousands of Southern farmers survived reconstruction…They received no aid from any source, nor any sympathy outside the region.

By 1870, Southern bank capital totaled only $17 million, compared to $61 million in 1860. So great was the devastation and anemic the rebound that by 1900 the South had barely recovered to the level of economic activity prior to the Civil War. Although Southern poverty and cotton culture is commonly associated with blacks, in 1940 two-thirds of Southern tenant farmers were whites. Shortly after the Great Depression began, the president of General Motors (Alfred P. Sloan) voluntarily cut his annual salary from $500,000 to $340,000. His $160,000 cut was more than all the income taxes paid by the two million residents of Mississippi that year.

When Lee surrendered to Grant, more than two million fungible cotton bales were scattered across the South. Given an average price of 43 cents per pound, each bale was worth about $172, putting the value of the entire inventory at nearly $345 million as compared to perhaps $15 million of US currency then circulating in the region. The cotton might have been a resource to prime the pump of Southern recovery, but instead it was plundered.

Union soldiers, US treasury officials, and Northern businessmen stole most of it under the pretext of legitimate confiscation, or no pretext at all. A dismayed US Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch remarked, “I am sure that I sent some honest cotton agents South, but it sometimes seems very doubtful that any of them remained honest very long.”

Southern lands were confiscated for non-payment of taxes, which were some of the highest in relation to wealth in US history. At one point 15% of Mississippi’s taxable land was up for sale due to tax defaults.

When the Civil War ended the Republican Party was barely ten years old. Its leaders worried that it might be strangled in its cradle if the re-admittance of Southern states into the Union failed to be managed in a manner that would prevent Southerners from allying with Northern Democrats to regain control of the federal government. If all former Confederate states were admitted to the 39th Congress in December 1865 and each added member was a Democrat, the Republican majority in the Senate would have dropped from 40-to-10 to 40-to-32. Even more significantly, the Democrats would have seized a 143-to-111 majority in the House of Representatives versus an extant Republican majority of 111-to-72.

US Capitol in 1866

The infant GOP needed to insure that most of the new Southern senators and congressmen be re-admitted as Republicans. That meant that vassal governments needed to be established in the Southern states. Since there were few white Republicans in the region the Party needed to create a new constituency. Consequently, Republicans settled on two objectives. First was mandatory African-American suffrage in all former Confederate states. They expected that such a mostly illiterate and inexperienced electorate could be manipulated to consistently support Republican interests out of gratitude for emancipation and voter suffrage. Second was to disenfranchise the Southern white classes most likely to oppose Republican policies.

When the Civil War began, African-Americans were not permitted to vote in sixteen of the twenty-two Union-loyal states. In most of the remaining six they could only vote by meeting property and education tests that were more stringent than those applied to whites. Upon the war’s conclusion, only five New England states with tiny black populations permitted blacks to vote.

Since the Constitution specified that voter qualifications were a matter of states’ rights, Republicans settled on a strategy that materialized as the Fourteenth Amendment, which had two key provisions. First, states refusing suffrage to male citizens of any race would have their congressional representation cut by subtracting the number of members of the excluded race from the applicable state’s population for purposes of calculating its House representation and electoral votes. Due to their tiny black populations, the provision was inconsequential in Northern states. Second, despite the fact that Congress considered their governments unlawful, all Southern states would be required to ratify the amendment before they could be readmitted into the Union.

14th Amendment

Republicans were anxious to get Southern states re-admitted as puppet regimes quickly because of the approaching presidential election. Through various acts congress disenfranchised enough Southern whites to enable the Fourteenth Amendment to be approved by a sufficient number of Southern Republican states for it to be ratified in July 1868 thereby assuring a large block of electoral votes for the party’s presidential candidate, Ulysses Grant, who would have lost the popular vote without 450,000 black Southern voters.

Since six of the readmitted Southern states voted for Grant in 1868 and only two voted against him, it soon became apparent that a second amendment granting black men the vote in every state could be quickly approved. As a result, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the states in 1870, less than a year after Grant took office.

During Reconstruction Southerners were required to pay their share of federal taxes for sizable budget items that if funded by an independent defeated foe would have constituted reparations. To be sure, reparations are not a rare form of a victor’s compensation, but it should not be assumed that the Southern states escaped equivalent penalties merely because they were readmitted to the Union.

The table below summarizes federal tax revenues and spending for a quarter century following the Civil War. More than half of federal tax revenues were applied to three items: (1) federal debt interest, (2) budget surpluses, and (3) Union veterans benefits. Although compelled to pay their share of taxes to fund them, former Confederates derived no benefit from the allocations.

Post-war surpluses were mostly used to retire the federal debt owed to Northerners who bought bonds sold during the Civil War when the federal debt jumped more than forty-fold from $65 million to nearly $2.7 billion. Similarly, Northerners received the interest payments on such debt, which accounted for 23% of federal revenues for a quarter century after the war.

The budget surpluses were caused by protective tariffs that generated more income than necessary to operate the federal government. As the table below documents dutiable items were taxed at about 45% until after President Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913 and remained generally high until after World War II when the manufacturing economies of the Northern states had no international competitors because of the war’s destruction of European and Asian economies.

The purpose of such tariffs was to restrict competition for domestic producers, almost none of which were in the South. The South’s was primarily an export economy. Even as late as the 1930s, 60% of its cotton was sold overseas. But foreign buyers could not pay for Southern cotton unless they could generate exchange credits by selling manufactured goods to Americans, which protective tariffs restricted.

Finally, former Confederates derived no benefit from generous federal spending on Union veteran pensions. Ex-Rebel soldiers could only collect much smaller pensions from their respective states. Union veteran pensions were originally paid only to soldiers who sustained disabling injuries during military service, but Republicans gradually expanded eligibility to solidify veterans as a Party constituency. In 1878 the military-connected disability requirement was waived for widows. In 1890 pensions were available to all disabled veterans even if the disabilities resulted from post war civilian activities. In 1904 any Union veteran over age 62 was regarded as disabled and entitled to a pension. In 1876 Union veterans pensions represented 10% of the federal budget but the fraction climbed to 25% in 1886 and reached 40% in 1900.

While some federal spending items not specified above benefitted the South, they were few, tiny, or funded by the Southerners themselves. From 1865 – 1873 the federal government spent $103 million on public works, but less than 10% went to the former Confederate states. New York and Massachusetts alone got more than twice as much as the entire South.

Instead the federal government taxed cotton. As prices dropped after the war the levy represented about one-fifth of the market value. It raised $68 million, which was about seven times the amount of public works spending in the South from 1865 to 1873. The tax could not be passed along to buyers since most American cotton was exported where it had to compete with cotton from other countries that had no such tax.

While the Freedmen’s Bureau provided some economic assistance, it was mostly devoted to the ex-slaves. Moreover, the cotton tax alone amounted to nearly three times the federal spending on the Bureau during the Bureau’s entire existence.

To clarify how post Civil War banking regulations restrained post war Southern economic recovery it should be understood that for fifteen years prior to the war the federal government could stamp coins (mostly in specie of gold or silver) but was prohibited from printing paper money. The only paper currency then circulating were the banknotes of independent banks, which merited little value if they could not be redeemed for specie. The wheels of commerce required the circulation of such banknotes or specie.

Enormous financing induced by the Civil War compelled monetary changes. The first was the 1862 Legal Tender Act, which paved the way for the 1863 National Banking Act. The first act authorized the federal government to print paper money without gold backing and the second forced national banks to become regular buyers of federal bonds, which were used to finance the war. Independent banks were nearly driven out of existence by placing a 10% tax on their banknotes.

Ruins of Charleston in 1865

Although the post Civil War South badly needed rebuilding capital it was almost impossible for regional investors to organize suitable banks.

First, national bank capital requirements were beyond the means of impoverished Southerners. Second, national banks could not make mortgage loans, a type of loan essential to the agrarian South. Third, national banks were prohibited from operating more than a single branch, which was a handicap in the sparsely populated South. Fourth, even though state chartered banks might offer mortgages and/or require less start-up capital, the 10% federal tax on their banknotes burdened them with prohibitive operating costs.

Although the currently popular Reconstruction narrative portrays Southern Democrats as conservative, if not reactionary, the label is often erroneous when matters of economics, instead of race, are studied. When Republicans the lost Presidency from 1913 to 1921 to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the former Southerner promoted a wave of progressive legislation.

Although the Sixteenth (Income Tax) Amendment was passed shortly before Wilson took office, four years later it became graduated in order to minimize the burden on lower income taxpayers. Southerners had long supported the tax as an alternate revenue source that would enable tariffs to be cut. Consequently, tariffs were reduced to 27% during Wilson’s eight years as compared to 48% in the eight preceding years and 38% in the eight following years. Also under Wilson the long-sought Southern goal of banking reform materialized when the Federal Reserve System was created. The 1916 Federal Farm Loan Act and Warehouse Act were outgrowths of a sub-treasury plan advocated by Southerners twenty-five years earlier.

US Army trail with Lincoln’s Presidential car

Another example of Southern progressivism was monopoly regulation. After former Confederate Postmaster General John Regan became a US Congressman in 1875, he was one of the first advocates of railroad rate regulation, which led to formation of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

The South was saddled with discriminatory railroad rates that took decades to rectify. Even as late as the 1940s Georgia Governor Ellis Arnell led a fight against “the freight-rate cartel” that hindered Southern economic development. Finally, in 1945, the ICC reduced “class-freight rates” 10% in the South and West and increased them 10% in the North and East. It was a tardy start at dismantling a persistent obstacle to Southern economic progress.

Southerners constantly opposed protective tariffs, which were the root cause of monopolies. In 1899 the President of New York based American Sugar Refining conceded, “The mother of all trusts is the customs tariff bill.” By 1907 his company controlled 98% the country’s sugar processing capacity and it was the city’s most profitable manufacturing business. Its most popular brand, Domino Sugar, remains familiar today.

While it is appropriate that Reconstruction history include a thorough analysis of racism and its protracted effects, contemporary historians give far less attention to numerous political and economic aspects, even though such factors are equally important.

Philip Leigh contributed twenty-three articles to The New York Times Disunion blog, which commemorated the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Westholme Publishing released of Phil’s three Civil War books to date:

Phil has lectured a various Civil War forums, including the 23rd Annual Sarasota Conference of the Civil War Education Association and various Civil War Roundtables. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Florida Institute of Technology and an MBA from Northwestern University.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power is one of the great stories of European history. He was born the son of a minor noble on the island off the coast of Italy, yet in just a few decades he gained control of France and conquered most of Europe. He could do this because he had the skills and abilities required to seize favorable situations that he encountered and turn them to his own benefit. In his life, we can learn principles that are applicable to anyone, as well as dangerous traits common to many dictators in history who have abused their power.

Napoleon on campaign in France in 1814

1. Always Learning

The first characteristic of Napoleon is that he was diligent to always be improving himself and acquiring knowledge that would help him in future tasks. As a young man, he was a vivacious reader, studying history, science and philosophy. He especially enjoyed the ancient classics, and modeled himself upon their heroes, like Caesar or Alexander the Great.

Later in life, when he was planning a military campaign, he would read books about the place in which he would be operating. Studying the country’s history, geography and culture made him better prepared for whatever he would encounter, and help him to avoid errors that previous generals had made.

He was also a very good interviewer. Although he was a proud man, he was not afraid to demonstrate his ignorance if the person he was speaking to could enlighten him. He would often grill someone with deep and perceptive questions, getting from them any information that would be useful. Even as commanding general, he would often personally interview captured prisoners, hoping to gain any information from them that he could.

Battle of Valmy

2. Good General

Napoleon entered the French army at a time when quick advancement was possible. The French Revolution resulted in many royalist officers leaving the army, and in constant wars which gave the opportunity for young officers like Napoleon to advance through victory. Napoleon was very successful in his military campaigns, and that laid the foundation necessary for his political achievements. He fought 60 battles in his career, and lost only seven, mostly towards the end. He was talented both strategically and tactically. In campaign after campaign he defeated larger armies with a smaller force, through methods like moving boldly and quickly, defeating them in detail, cutting off their lines of retreat, and doing what his enemies least expected. He was undoubtedly a brilliant general, and many have counted him as the best general in world history.

Napoleon and the Sphinx

3. Efficient Organizer

Bonaparte was not just a great general, he was also good at logistics. One of his most famous maxims is that, “An army marches on its stomach.” If troops are not well equipped and well fed, they can not be expected to fight well. Napoleon was very skilled at logistics. He ensured that the preparations were in place to keep his troops fighting effectively. He wrote many letters just about shoes, to make sure that his army would be able to keep marching. He was also quite financially astute. Even when he was spending vast amounts of money on imperial palaces, from time to time he would review the accounts and refuse to pay bills that he thought were unreasonable. This logistical competence was necessary to win his victories.

Napoleon

4. Brilliance

One essential feature of Napoleon’s character was his brilliance. Not only was he very smart, he could also handle many topics at once. He could dictate letter after letter to his secretaries, on a wide variety of topics, often without even stopping to think. He could also compartmentalize his mind. Even in the midst of a very stressful campaign, he could put the present situation behind him and think with incredible clarity about another separate issue. This also allowed him to make the most of his time. Even in the midst of a battle, he could clear his mind of all the stress and seize a moment to take a fifteen minute nap, waking refreshed to continue to direct the battle. He had an immense capacity for work, sometimes working for several days with virtually no rest.

Napoleon had an immense memory for details. It is related that during the campaign of 1805, one of his commanders could not locate his division. As his aides began to search through their maps and papers to find the location, the emperor told it to them from memory, where it would be positioned during the next three days, along with the strength and status of each unit.

Napoleon on the battlefield

5. Good Government

One thing that is common to many dictators is that they improve the government in the countries over which they rule. The legend about Mussolini is that he made the trains run on time. This is also true of Napoleon. When he came to power in France, he fixed many of the nation’s problems. He ensured that contractors and troops got paid on time. He subjugated the bandits that that been plaguing parts of the country since the Revolution. He also instituted the Napoleonic legal code in France, which is still the basis for French law today. It brought to France a single set of laws, wiping out the confusing remnants of feudalism. The emperor considered this to be his greatest accomplishment, writing, “[W]hat nothing will destroy, what will live forever, is my Civil Code.” The stability that all these reforms brought increased Napoleon’s popularity with the people, and gave him a greater tenure in power than anyone had enjoyed since the French Revolution.

Napoleon on his throne

6. Convincing Propaganda

Napoleon was a master of propaganda and popular manipulation. He knew how important the people’s opinion was, and used his rhetorical power to shape it for his purposes. One way he did this was by skillfully riding the tide of public opinion. When the French Revolution first began, he was a supporter of the Jacobins. Yet as his career advanced, he eventually got himself appointed first consul, then dictator, overturning many of the revolutionary principles with the reestablishment of titles of nobility, special honors, dynastic houses, and himself as a sovereign dictator. “The Revolution is over,” he said, “I am the Revolution.” Napoleon got the French people to accept him as the embodiment of the Revolution, even as he reversed many of its principles.

Personally, he was a man of simple tastes, preferring to wear a military uniform. Yet he knew the people wanted a show, so he wore extravagant outfits and lived in fancy palaces. He was willing to use religion for his purposes – portraying himself as a Muslim to the Egyptian Muslim, as an atheist to the French revolutionaries, and as a Catholic to the European Catholics. Personally caring little about religion, he used it to appeal to whatever people group he needed.

Napoleon was also very involved with the French press. The newspapers were under tight control, and if they published anything with which the emperor did not agree, they would be shut down. He was very cognizant of how the papers shaped public opinion, and would often write columns for the newspapers to make sure they espoused exactly his views. In those columns he was far from honest. Bonaparte exaggerated whenever he thought necessary, inflating his victories and covering up his defeats. When he ran for control of France in popular elections, he won in landslides. Yet he, and doubtless countless Bonapartists under him, still felt it necessary to fake the election results, making them even more favorable than they actually were.

Napoleon’s troops accept him back from Elba

7. Popular Charisma

Many of the early qualities worked together to give him an incredible charisma and popularity with his soldiers and people. When he escaped from his exile on the island of Elba and landed on the shores of France, he soon met the 5th Regiment of the French army, who had been sent to capture him. However, he simply dismounted from his horse and walked up to them, saying, “Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish.” With that, the troops immediately switched sides, and joined him on his quest to regain control of France.

On the battlefield, he carried with him an aura of victory, even in the worst situations. He exuded confidence to his troops, inspiring them and assuring them that victory was certain. This was crucial to his victories, for as he said, “Moral force rather than numbers, decides victory.” Victory made him popular with the men. They were fighting under the man that had turned their country into a world power – one of the greatest generals in world history. Off the battlefield he demonstrated care for his soldiers. He would often inquire after their welfare, making sure that they had the food and supplies they needed. As one historian has written, he “inspired Frenchman and foreigners alike with fierce loyalty and devotion.”

These factors gave him incredible popularity in France. People still loved him even after his downfall. For years Napoleonic memorabilia was banned in France, but people still smuggled it in. One of my ancestors was a soldier under Napoleon, one of his Old Guard. He immigrated to America after Waterloo, but he still said that if he heard that Napoleon had turned to France, he would drop his new life and return to Europe to fight under his old commander.

Napoleon in his final exile on St. Helena

Downfall

It was these seven characteristics that allowed Napoleon Bonaparte to achieve one of the most remarkable careers in the world. However, as he grew older, his abilities began to fade. He gained a lot weight, his health began to decline, and with it, his capacity for work. His pride and belief in his own destiny began to push him into wars he was not able to win, and his force of character turned into stubbornness. Although the older Napoleon was not the same as his younger self, he was still a force to be reckoned with. Even after he was defeated by the coalition, he escaped from the island of Elba, and in the Hundred Days regained control of France before being finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

99 years ago today, on July 1, 1916, the British, with the assistance of the French, made the first attack of the Battle of the Somme. Tens of thousands of British soldiers were killed and wounded, for very minimal gains. We visited the Somme Battlefield on our recent Europe Tour. Here are pictures of how this horrible battlefield looks nearly 100 years later.

Lochnagar Crater, blown up under German lines

There are thousands of graves across Flanders with inscriptions like this, for soldiers who could not be identified. They are known only to God.

Shell craters in the Newfoundland Memorial

German front lines in the Newfoundland Memorial

The Danger Tree. When the 1st Newfoundland charged on July 1, none made it past this stump, just a few dozen paces from their lines.